Newt Bites Fox, Fox Snarks Back

Jon Ponder

Newt Gingrich lashed out at his former employer, Fox News, in a private meeting with a handful of Delaware tea baggers this week:

“I think FOX has been for Romney all the way through,” Gingrich said during the private meeting — to which RealClearPolitics was granted access — at Wesley College. “In our experience, Callista and I both believe CNN is less biased than FOX this year. We are more likely to get neutral coverage out of CNN than we are of FOX, and we’re more likely to get distortion out of FOX. That’s just a fact.

…“I assume it’s because Murdoch at some point [who] said, ‘I want Romney,’ and so ‘fair and balanced’ became ‘Romney,’ ” Gingrich said. “And there’s no question that Fox had a lot to do with stopping my campaign because such a high percentage of our base watches FOX.”

Translation: “It was okay with me that Fox was a Republican Party propaganda channel — until they turned their propagandizing against me.”

A little later, Newt’s Cry Baby personality — the one that shut down the U.S. government in 1996 because mean ol’ Bill Clinton made him ride in the back of Air Force One — had something to say:

“They know I don’t care about their opinions,” he said. “I don’t go to their cocktail parties. I don’t go to their Christmas parties. The only press events I go to are interesting dinners when the wife insists on it, so we’re going to go to the White House Correspondents’ dinner because she wants to. And we’re actually going to go to CNN’s table, not FOX.”

The bit about his not coming to the Fox Christmas party must have struck a nerve at the propaganda network. Dave Weigel found this “classic, needlessly mean” reaction from a Fox spox:

This is nothing other than Newt auditioning for a windfall of a gig at CNN — that’s the kind of man he is. Not to mention, he’s still bitter about the fact that we terminated his contributor contract.

It’s true. Fox cancelled his $1 million per year contract when Newt announced he was running for president. It’s also true that he could use the money now. Newt’s campaign is about $5 million in debt and is welching on payments to its small-business suppliers, and his heath-care “thimk tank” recently declared bankruptcy.

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Enumerati

67%

A new CBS News poll finds that while 55% of Americans disapprove of the way President Trump reacted to the violence by white supremacists in Charlottesville, 67% of Republicans approve of his response.

A new PRRI survey finds that 40% of Americans — including nearly three-quarters of Democrats but just seven percent of Republicans — back impeaching President Trump and removing him from office.

Enumerati

16

ThinkProgress notes that just 16 of 292 Republicans in Congress have released statements that call out Trump directly by name or title for his comments.

Enumerati

3x

Consider this: In the Capitol’s National Statuary Hall Collection there are three times as many statues of Confederate soldiers and politicians as there are statues of black people in the entire Capitol complex, according to records maintained by the Architect of the Capitol, the Washington Post reports

Enumerati

34

Washington Post: PayPal has agreed to removed at least 34 organizations, including Richard Spencer’s National Policy Institute, two companies that sell gun accessories explicitly for killing Muslims, as well as all accounts associated with Jason Kessler, the white nationalist blogger who organized the Charlottesville march, according to a list provided to the Post by Color of Change, a racial justice organization seeking to influence corporate decision makers.

Verbatim

“If allowed to continue along this senseless path, Mr. Trump will do lasting harm to American society and to our standing in the world. By his words and his actions, Mr. Trump is putting our national security and our collective futures at grave risk.”

Verbatim

“The white supremacist, KKK, and neo-nazi groups who brought hatred and violence to Charlottesville are now planning a rally in Lexington. Their messages of hate and bigotry are not welcome in Kentucky and should not be welcome anywhere in America. We can have no tolerance for an ideology of racial hatred. There are no good neo-nazis, and those who espouse their views are not supporters of American ideals and freedoms. We all have a responsibility to stand against hate and violence, wherever it raises its evil head.”

— Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who has been publicly silent so far over President Trump’s latest remarks on Charlottesville, “is privately upset” with the president’s handling of the episode, CNN reports.

Verbatim

“I’m sorta glad that them people got hit and I’m glad that girl died. They were a bunch of Communists out there protesting against somebody’s freedom of speech, so it doesn’t bother me that they got hurt at all. … I think we’re going to see more stuff like this happening at white nationalist events.”

— Justin Moore, the Grand Dragon for the Loyal White Knights of Ku Klux Klan, said he was glad that a woman died in Charlottesville when a car drove through a crowd, the Charlotte Observer reports.

Verbatim

“If Trump finally pushes Bannon out of the White House, the nationalist policy project will be all but dead. The new chief of staff, John Kelly, is far more moderate on immigration and has pushed Trump to abandon the idea of a physical border wall. Economic policy will be fully under the control of Cohn, and the heretical idea of raising taxes on the wealthy will have no champion. Trump himself has always been more animated by the xenophobia of Bannonism than by its populist economic views. A Trump White House without Bannon will be no more radical in its coddling of far-right groups—today Trump showed again that he needs no encouragement—but it will be more captured by the traditional small-government agenda of the G.O.P. Bannon hoped to destroy.”

Verbatim

“What is Robert E. Lee known for? This is what I mean by the margins of the debate. Lee is known for one thing: being the key military leader in a violent rebellion against the United States and leading that rebellion to protect slavery. That’s it. Absent his decision to participate in the rebellion he’d be all but unknown to history. He outlived the war by only five years. There’s simply no positive side of the ledger to make it a tough call. The only logic to honoring Lee is to honor treason and treason in the worst possible cause.”